Schooners

Tourists aboard the passenger schooner Mercantile assist in raising the anchor by working the windlass. Passenger labor is always welcome in working the windjammer schooners.

Mercantile was launched as a small coasting schooner in 1916 by the Billings family on Deer Isle. After she fished for mackerel for a few years in the 1940s, she was bought by Captain Frank Swift who had started the passenger schooner business in Maine in 1936, sailing out of Camden.

Three-masted schooner Nettie Langdon, built in East Boston in 1875 and registered in Jacksonville, Florida in 1883 and the tug Sumner M. Small at Steamboat Wharf in Belfast. Tugboats made gettting in and out of ports much easier and even possible for larger sailing vessels.

Schooners like the Annie & Reuben carried most of the granite quarried on the Maine coast during the nineteenth century. Though not as dangerous a cargo as lime, granite was so heavy that its weight could wear down a vessel, shortening its life and opening its seams.

Annie & Reuben was built in 1891 in the backyard of lumberman Reuben S. Hunt's house in Bath and named for his two children.

She was bought by John I. Goss & Co. of Deer Isle for their Crotch Island quarry, to carry stone primarily to Boston.

Tug Bismark off Odom's Ledge, Fort Point, towing six schooners up the Penobscot River to Bangor.

The 103' Bismark was built in Philadelphia in 1888 for the Ross and Howell Penobscot RIver fleet, by the Chas. Hillman Company, with a compound (two cylinder) engine by well known engine builder Neafie and Levy. She was the most popular towboat on the Penobscot, powerful and smooth. Her career ended in New York Harbor after being sold in 1910 along with a number of other Penobscot tugs.

Tern schooner (3-masted schooner) with a load of lumber, including a large deckload. Since lumber floated, masters were not as concerned about overloading as they were with other cargoes. Schooners like this one were frequently loaded so that water was almost at deck level. Lumber came into Belfast for shipbuilding, building construction, and for the Matthews Brothers business of making doors and windows.

The November 1898 "Portland Gale" forced the schooner Bertha E. Glover into Martha's Vineyard while carrying a cargo of lime. She sprung a leak; water got into the cargo, and it began to burn. The ship was lost as a result of the lime cargo getting wet. The vessel had been rebuilt in Rockland in 1882 for the lime trade.

Capt. J.W. Lunt of the schooner Pioneer of Tremont kept a log while fishing during the year 1861. The log was used to support a bounty claim from the federal government. This part of the log shows what each fisherman caught each day in September and provided the basis for their federal subsidy. These logs have helped to reconstruct the historic cod catch before good statistics. At this time the schooner was probably hand-lining with the fishermen lining the rail, each with a pair of baited lines.